


Using Classpect Theory as a Means to Analyze the Star Wars Prequels and The Clone Wars

by transkenobis



Category: Homestuck, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Classpects (Homestuck), Gen, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-29
Updated: 2020-10-29
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:26:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27271885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/transkenobis/pseuds/transkenobis
Summary: Or; I'm a Pedant Who Cannot Shut Up, Ever.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 11





	Using Classpect Theory as a Means to Analyze the Star Wars Prequels and The Clone Wars

**Author's Note:**

> Edits, 2/11/2021: Fixing broken links, because Tumblr hasn't figured out a decent way to consolidate URL changes. If any break in the future, please let me know.

Nice. We’re doing this.

Obligatory disclaimers: much of my understanding of Class and Aspect is from these two ([Aspect](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24199798) and [Class](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26869882)) essays combined with the Extended Zodiac Aspect descriptions. While I do use quotes, reading the essays and descriptions will give you the Fullest Possible Understanding. There are fun diagrams if reading 14,000 words about something you don’t care about doesn’t appeal to you, and you’ll survive this regardless. I do recommend some base-level knowledge of the Aspects, but they’re all very intuitive: Light handles knowledge and relevance, Heart is about identity and the ego, Life is about, uh, being alive, Breath is about freedom, and so on.

The Star Wars prequels (and by extension, The Clone Wars) are incredibly interesting to me in so many different ways. I love the characters, the settings, and the various contrived plot devices. But the most fundamental aspect of the prequels and TCW is their role as a tragedy. 

“Let me here remind you that the essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things. This inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in fact involve unhappiness. For it is by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the drama.”

\- Alfred North Whitehead

The prequels occupy a very specific role in the narrative of Star-Wars-As-A-Story. By nature of being prequels, they have a set end point that they have to end up at. The ending of the prequels is determined by the beginning of the original trilogy. The Jedi Order has to be gone. Luke and Leia have to be born and be twins and be separated. The Empire has to exist, and Palpatine has to be its Emperor. Anakin has to fall and become Darth Vader. All of these things are necessary. They are the end point, the inevitable destiny, the Doom of the prequels.

But, oddly enough, the prequels are not a story about Doom.

The prequels are not ultimately about that end point--they’re about the slow, unpreventable crawl towards it. The prequels are about the push that leads to Doom--Time.

For those of you who aren’t nearly as invested in Classpect theory as I am, [0pacifica on Twitter](https://twitter.com/0pacifica?lang=en) defines Time as contraction, as planned death, as “the organized path the narrative takes to its ending.” If the prequels were a story about Doom, we wouldn’t have The Phantom Menace, or really, anything except the last hour or so of Revenge of the Sith. Time is necessary--all stories have to end--but not every story is a story about Time. Not every story ends in unpreventable tragedy.

(The unpreventable tragedy of these movies is something that prequel stans acknowledge, and then throw out the window with fix-it aus galore. The funny thing is that most of those fix-it aus involve time travel. Gods, I love this. I could do this all day.)

As the main character and Chosen Hero of the prequels, Anakin is a Time player. I’ll go more into his role within that later, because now I want to talk about The Clone Wars on their own.

The Clone Wars are interesting within this view of narrative--to an extent, they exist to make the end point of the prequels more plausible, in the same way that the prequels exist to make the original trilogy more plausible. They show more of Anakin’s downhill slide, how the common populus becomes disillusioned enough with the Jedi to accept Order 66, and Palpatine playing everyone for suckers. But they also add in characters who, from an objective standpoint, don’t matter in terms of the narrative. They add nothing to the Material of the narrative--the overall plot of the prequels will not change. It literally can’t, as we all learned in the most painful way possible while watching the Siege of Mandalore arc. Why did we get seven seasons of it, then?

Because it adds Meaning. 

The Clone Wars is a story about Breath--it expands the Meaning of the story of the prequels, and of the saga as a whole, via the ties to Rebels. As 0pacifica puts it, Breath is “what’s meaningful and important is discovering something new, expanding that perspective[.]” From the very beginning, The Clone Wars introduced new characters and new concepts and new plots that ultimately expanded the idea of what it means for something to be Star Wars. Can you imagine a Star Wars without Ahsoka? Without Rex and Fives? Without Bo-Katan and Satine and Mandalore? Without Maul? I bet you can’t. The Clone Wars pressed the “zoom out” button on Star Wars and said, “I know that you all cared about these other things before, and you’re going into this show because you care about those other things, but we are going to make you care about so many new things too.”

The Clone Wars is also the longest piece of Star Wars media out there, clocking in at 133 twenty-minute episodes and a feature-length movie. The movie was released in 2008, and the story was brought back from cancellation in 2020 for the final season. It’s had a massive impact on all of the Star Wars media that’s come after, particularly in that it showed that Dave Filoni Could Write And Direct A Star Wars Thing, And Everyone Would Love It and thus paved the way for Rebels and The Mandalorian. The Clone Wars took the fan idea of What Star Wars Is out back and shot it, in true Breath fashion.

While Anakin is the de facto main character of Star Wars, and thus The Clone Wars, The Clone Wars as-a-separate-entity’s main character is Ahsoka Tano. You know, the character that everyone hated at first because she was bouncy and curious and unfamiliar and so very Breath-y and the character that everyone now loves because she’s the coolest. Her.

\---

In this essay, I use the term “narrative” a lot. I’ve already used it or “story,” what, twelve times? I have to do some definition here to justify my constant use of it to explain things. 

When I say that the narrative wants or needs or does something, I mean the overarching plot of the story goes a certain way to reach a certain end. In 0pacifica’s essays, they use Skaia, since Skaia’s goal with SBURB and Classpects as a mechanic of SBURB is to “make more Skaia.” In this essay, I mean the Force, and there’s in-universe justification for me using it that way. Qui-Gon talks about how him finding Anakin was “the will of the Force.” That’s the Material Aspect--the Force wills it in-universe, so it happens in-universe.

There’s also the Meaning side of things. Star Wars is a story, a saga, an incoherent mess of fake words and bad acting, whatever you want to call it. It exists because some dude named George wanted to make a movie that would be fun to watch. The Force doesn’t actually exist (though myself and others of more metaphysical persuasions do believe in similar concepts) and neither do the characters and settings in the story. But the story still matters to us. We still care about it. It Means something to me, and to you as well (and if it doesn’t, I’d ask why you’re reading this of your own free will). 

Material and Meaning are both the narrative, and when I say “the narrative” does something I mean that the Force/the in-universe explanation willed it, George Lucas/whoever the author or director is wrote it, or a combination of the two. I trust your judgement to figure out which I mean on a case-by-case basis.

\---

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about Anakin “Chosen One and thus de facto main character” Skywalker again. 

The Revenge of the Sith novelization is the go-to example of Anakin Skywalker Characterization. Seriously, George Lucas edited his characterization himself, and while “George Lucas said so, therefore it’s the absolute truth” is never a position that I would endorse taking, Anakin is pretty spot-on. Matthew Stover gives us a little bit on Who Exactly This Guy Is, and while I am very tempted to copy/paste it all, I'll just give you bullet points.

Anakin is better, faster, stronger, etc. by far than any other living Jedi. 

He's the best and he knows it.

He is also terrified. constantly.

He found out that stars can die and it was all downhill from there. All things die, Anakin Skywalker. Even stars burn out.

Death is the will of the Force, as is life. Jedi don’t form attachments because ultimately, everything passes, so it’s pointless to hold on past your time.

Anakin is terrified of losing Padmé and Obi-Wan. (Ahsoka didn’t exist at this point, but I add her in here as well.)

Anakin is stronger than his fear. He's the best and he’s still getting better.

But he knows that stars can die.

In a universe where stars die, is being the best ever going to be good enough?

It’s just Time. To quote the Extended Zodiac quiz (though the entire Time description is just Anakin Skywalker), “they are fundamentally incapable of just accepting things as they come.” Anakin cannot accept that people die because it’s their time (ha, ha, get it--[sound of gunshots]). He can’t accept his mother’s death, he can’t accept Obi-Wan “dying” during the Deception arc, he can’t accept Ahsoka leaving the Order, he can’t accept visions of Padmé dying, he can’t accept the idea that Palpatine could die on the Invisible Hand, and so on.

Time players are the determinators, people who believe that “impossible is just a word.” Stover tells us that Anakin literally does not believe in “impossible,” because for him, the impossible has an eerie way of being merely difficult. And because he refuses to accept defeat. That too.

In trying to be Better Enough to Win, to Not Fail When It Matters Most, Anakin pushes himself harder and further. And in doing so, he inadvertently pushes himself to the destruction of everything he’s tried so hard to save.

Because Anakin Skywalker is the quintessential Prince of Time.

Princes, as 0pacifica puts it, start at the top, and thus have nowhere to go but down. Though Anakin begins his narrative enslaved, he wins the podrace and his freedom. He's at the top of the world! He’s going to be a Jedi, and it is going to be wizard. He has a good run of it, but from the moment you see that weirdly Darth-Vader-esque shadow on the sand, you know it’s all going to be downhill from there. 

Anakin is the Chosen One. He has more advantage in the narrative than anyone really should, another sort of messianic archetype that fantasy loves so dearly. And yet he suffers--fear, anger, hate, and so on. 

Princes are chosen by the narrative for a very special sort of destiny: they cause conflict. The narrative needs them to cause conflict. And to get them to do so, it sucks them dry of everything they can give, and then it leaves them, like an absent father going to the store to get milk. Eridan dies. Kurloz dies. Dirk dies so frequently that it becomes something of a running joke. But Hope, Rage, and Heart are all Delinquent Aspects--they go against what the narrative wants and spice things up. What happens when your story’s Prince belongs to an Aspect necessary for the story? The narrative can’t toss Anakin away until he succeeds, until he brings balance to the Force and ends the story. And so it keeps him alive--in constant agony, but alive--until he does so.

Anakin uses Time, destruction, the push towards the End, to bring balance. His Fall is what kickstarts the Purge and the end of the Republic, killing nearly all of the Jedi, save two. He kills one, the other dies on his own. Then Anakin kills Palpatine. And finally, he dies himself because of the injuries he sustains whilst killing Palpatine. Anakin has to die to win, to end the story. He has to lose everything and dies with nothing. The narrative requires it, and the Prince is helpless but to comply. 

\---

On that cheery note, let’s go to Obi-Wan.

Obi-Wan is destined for, and I quote, “INFINITE SADNESS.” The narrative beats him up, both literally and figuratively. I mean, really, the amount of times this guy gets the tar knocked out of him during The Clone Wars is just sad. But the narrative needs Obi-Wan, because the narrative needs Anakin and Anakin needs Obi-Wan. The narrative needs Anakin to have a mentor who teaches him everything he needs to know, but Anakin needs to have a best friend who would do literally anything for him. Just to up the dangerous codependency and inability to let go and let things happen. You know how it is.

It’s sad that as much as I love Obi-Wan, I literally cannot talk about him as a character without constantly mentioning Anakin. Even Stover can’t do it--half of his this is Obi-Wan Kenobi bit is talking about his friendship with Anakin, and he ends the section thusly:

“He is the ultimate Jedi.

And he is proud to be Anakin Skywalker’s best friend.” 

Really. 

Anyways, I’m going to try to shut up about the wonderboy now.

The narrative puts Obi-Wan where he needs to be, regardless of what he personally wants. Obi-Wan wants to get rid of the Trade Federation’s blockade around Naboo in an efficient manner. Obi-Wan wants to stay as far away from Tatooine as humanly possible. Obi-Wan wants Qui-Gon to stop collecting Pathetic Life-Forms. Obi-Wan wants to beat Maul on Naboo. Obi-Wan wants Qui-Gon to live.

The narrative provides him with exactly none of these things. Instead, it unceremoniously drops a nine-year-old Chosen One in his lap and tells him train the boy. And because Obi-Wan is a sucker, and also because he has no choice, he responds, “yeah, okay, I guess? Fine?”

Obi-Wan Kenobi is a Blood player, and boy howdy, does the narrative love to make him bleed. He’s got the curse of Needing A Purpose, Preferably Involving Helping Other People, with a healthy dose of Being A Prick. He says, “well, what are you going to do, stab me?” And then the narrative stabs him. Repeatedly. And makes him get back up again. Just so that it can stab him some more. Obi-Wan Kenobi has more hubris and hypocrisy inside him than any person should really have. Obi-Wan is an obnoxious little man who refuses to give up. Obi-Wan is a charismatic thrill-seeker who acts like he has the moral high ground (ha, ha, get it--[sound of gunshots]). Obi-Wan pretends he’s everything Matthew Stover says he is--calm, centered, level-headed--while being, and I say this in the most loving way possible, The Absolute Worst. 

He’s Blood-bound: Blood players derive Meaning from what there already is, what’s around them and in front of them. Tradition and Family, both things that Obi-Wan is surrounded by in the prequels via the Order. 0pacifica puts it this way: “what’s meaningful and important is focusing on what is, the way we’ve always found meaning, in our connections and our legacy and what we choose to do about it.”

(Blood players also have a verifiable history of being The Worst, Actually. Karkat yells, Kankri doesn’t shut up. They’re both horribly disingenuous--do as I say, not as I do--and build up their Ideal Personas to the point that people believe them. People believe that Karkat is just Shouty McShouter and that Kankri is a Verifiable Ess Jay Double-You. Heart players may splinter and take masks on and off, but Blood players just wear the one disguise. Obi-Wan does the same thing--frames himself as calm and centered and definitely in complete control of his life. And people believe him. Other than Admiral Yularen, of course, who points out in Gambit: Stealth that he’s just as likely to go out in the most dramatic way possible as Anakin.)

Obi-Wan is used by the narrative, and when it isn’t beating him to a pulp and taking away everything that matters to him, it actually does great things through him. Stover gets one thing right, and it’s that Obi-Wan is full of the force--made of it, if you will. Yeah, he’s a Maid. I toyed around with Page for a while just because he does face so much meaningless abuse at the hands of the narrative, but it throws him far more bones than it does Jake and Tavros. Even on Tatooine, he still has purpose. And Obi-Wan’s purpose is helping people and Serving Others--which is what Maids do.

Maids become their Aspect, and their Aspect uses them for its whims. But they can’t use their Aspect to benefit themselves--they can only serve others, as their name would imply. The narrative doesn’t center Maids (or Seers, or Sylphs, or Mages--the Commensalist classes). They play support to the other Classes--that’s their lot in life. They can have personal arcs and character development, but it isn’t centered. If they want lowercase-m meaning in their lives, they have to find it on their own.

Obi-Wan takes on Anakin because Qui-Gon, his master, tells him to. He feels a sense of obligation to both of them, and that’s what makes him so insistent that he will train Anakin, without the approval of the council if he must, and that you will be a Jedi, I promise. [Oriyala on Tumblr](communistkenobi.tumblr.com) describes this aspect of his character thusly: “most of his life was spent presiding over the death of his loved ones, and the single most important duty he carried out as a Jedi was dealing with the dying wishes and personal affairs of the people he’d just buried.” Duty is heavier than a mountain, I guess. 

(Another interesting side tangent about Obi-Wan is his role in The Clone Wars, which, as I’ve already said, is a Breath-y story. Blood and Breath exist at opposite ends of the spectrum of Meaning. Blood says Meaning comes from the past, from tradition, from what’s already been done. Breath says Meaning, if it exists, comes from discovering new things and expanding your horizons. Obi-Wan’s purpose works fine in Star-Wars-As-A-Whole, but he doesn’t really get much character development in TCW. He's static--a fixed point--except for when he makes the most out-there, least-Obi-Wan decisions possible. like faking his death. TCW is not about Obi-Wan.)

\---

It’s Padmé time.

See, Padmé is a tricky case because 1) she exists for Anakin’s Prince of Time Chosen One Man Pain and also to give birth to Luke and Leia and 2) she got sidelined hard in The Clone Wars. The most we get of Real Actual Padmé is in The Phantom Menace, where she’s a child monarch. Don’t get me wrong, I love her and I love the two of them and I think that they legitimately do love each other. But from a narrative standpoint, Padmé only exists because Luke and Leia exist and need a biological mother. Her roles as queen and senator of Naboo come secondary to that.

In true contrast to Anakin’s Time, Padmé is bound to Space. Her role in the story is providing a means for Anakin’s redemption via Luke and the fall of the empire via Leia. Space produces the “Narrative-As-It-Should-Be,” and while Anakin is going cuckoo for coco puffs and killing younglings to bring about one half of balance, Padmé provides the means of his redemption. If Luke didn’t exist, there would be no one to show up on the Death Star II and say, “hey, I know that there’s still Good In You.” If Time is the march from the top of the hill down towards death, Space is the hike up the hill in the first place. Both are needed and necessary.

And Padmé is a necessary part of the narrative. Like Obi-Wan, she doesn’t have much narrative outside of Anakin “human riptide that sucks you out into the vast ocean that is his existence” Skywalker. And because the narrative Loves Anakin, her story is tied to his. The narrative uses her act of Creation and Mitosis to fuel Anakin’s Destruction, both in his Fall to the dark side and in him bringing balance in his death.

One thing worth noting here is how Space players tend to get ridiculous amounts of responsibility placed on their shoulders at a very young age. Jade has to get the non-troll non-Strilonde inhabitants of the Beta session out of the universe before The Scratch Destroys Everything. Kanaya is responsible for the mother grub--it’s her lusus on Alternia, and she has to instruct Roxy to make it in the Alpha kids’ universe. Calliope has to hold Caliborn back and keep him from going Off The Rails. Padmé is a monarch at age 14 while her planet is literally under siege (insert planet fucking Jupiter joke here), and when her term is up she goes straight into being a senator.

Now. Class. Like Obi-Wan, her role in the story is one of servitude. She has her moments in the sun, but ultimately, everything she does is in service. She’s put into positions of power, but the focus is how she’s using that power to help others, rather than elevating herself. I mean, I used to Classpect her as a Maid of Blood. Padmé’s story is about creation, but she’s just the one starting it. She is an inspiration and a starting point, nothing more or less. The rebellion is led by people that she inspired and worked alongside. The war with the empire is won by her children. but Padmé herself doesn’t get to lead the rebellion or win the war. 

(She’s quite dead, actually, because like nearly every other character in Star-Wars-As-A-Story, her character as it is only exists to serve the narrative, which is quite in love with Anakin. Padmé has to be a victim of Anakin’s Time-y destruction because her death is what facilitates much of his Fall. Padmé is a Space player and a reminder that even stars can die.)

Padmé is a Mage--she “transmutes [her] Aspect into a usable form for the benefit of others within the narrative, but without direct benefit to [herself.]” Though she does die, the story doesn’t have it in for her the way it would if she was a Witch. It doesn’t directly benefit her like it would if she was a Rogue, either. Padmé does the initial heavy lifting for the creation of the original trilogy then takes her leave of it. The narrative needs her to do two things--to sow seeds, both of the rebellion and of the galaxy’s salvation. The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones are the necessary lead-in to that one thing. She doesn’t have a large role in The Clone Wars because the narrative needs nothing from her until Revenge of the Sith, where she sets the precedent for the rebellion, gets pregnant, and gives birth. 

And really, isn’t birth what Space is about?

\---

Let’s talk about Ahsoka again.

Her narrative is about Breath. That’s easy, and I’ve already explained part of why I think that, but it’s been around 2.5K words, so I’ll reiterate: people hated Ahsoka when she was first introduced because she was new and unfamiliar and curious and immature and pushed the boundaries of what it meant to be a Main-Character-In-Star-Wars. People went into The Clone Wars for Anakin and Obi-Wan and The War, not a teenage girl who they thought was shoehorned into the plot for no reason.

Funny to think about that now, though, considering Ahsoka Tano is one of the most beloved characters in the saga. Ahsoka’s existence challenged the audience’s preconceived ideas of what a Star Wars Character should be in the same way that The Clone Wars as a whole challenged what a Star Wars Media should be. In true Breath fashion, she changed how many people thought about Star Wars.

But Ahsoka’s personal story is about Breath, too. She was raised in the Temple, had friends and family and connections that mattered to her. Then she got accused of terrorism and booted from the Order. The Wrong Jedi arc is messed up in many ways, both in wow it was sure a ““good choice”” to make the hijabi-coded character bomb a building ways and in HOLY SHIT WHY IS A SIXTEEN YEAR OLD BEING THREATENED WITH LIFE IN PRISON ways. But it’s one of the arcs that defines Ahsoka and forces her to define herself. All she’s known is being a Jedi, and then it’s taken away from her. But in the end, she chooses to go out on her own--the Council offers to let her come back, and she says no.

Then we have the season seven walkabout arc that a lot of people hate for some reason. Ignoring the fact that there isn’t a single man who plays a major role in the arc and any complaints that may be rooted in that, people talk about it as filler. “Filler episodes” are a Hope concept in the sense of unchecked and ultimately meaningless growth, but they’re a Breath concept in the sense of expanding what Matters enough in a story to justify showing in a story. Ahsoka gets four “filler episodes” that serve to show more of her character after leaving the Order. She gets to meet new people that never show up again and go places that were only vaguely developed before. 

Talking to Trace and Rafa further expands her horizons re: the Jedi Order, a very Blood-y organization. It's implied that she wanted to come back, but she never does, renouncing the title of “Jedi” by the time she appears in Rebels. She refuses to be tied down by her past and by an organization that functionally does not exist. Breath-Via-Ahsoka says that you can’t be held back by what already is and what was--you have to keep pushing forwards, even when it’s hard.

Ahsoka’s relationship with Breath is entirely about her--her story, her self-actualization, what she needs to succeed and to thrive. Functionally, she serves a role in Anakin’s story, as do most of the other characters, and that role is to make his Fall more plausible. But The Clone Wars are also about her. The Clone Wars as-is cannot exist without Ahsoka being somewhere in the universe! She, along with Rex, makes The Clone Wars The Clone Wars. Dave Filoni has said that the overarching narrative of the narrative is about them. More about Rex later, though. 

Ahsoka’s Class, as far as I can say, is Thief. She's self-confident because her story has given her reason to believe that she’s important, that her existence the narrative As-A-Whole is crucial. She didn’t have to exist, but The Clone Wars is about expanding Meaning, about making Meaning from the new and unfamiliar. The character arcs of Thieves are their shaping into someone who can realize and fulfill the desires of themselves and of their narrative. The Clone Wars needs a Hero of Breath, someone new who can make themself Matter to themself and to others. Thieves get net gains in their Aspect (and in the narrative) and though Ahsoka loses so much, she finds incredible amounts of meaning and purpose because she’s been pushed away from the old and the familiar. Her leaving the Order is a loss, but it gives her more freedom to find out What It Means To Be Ahsoka Tano.

(You know, all this is what makes Ahsoka and Obi-Wan’s last interactions in Old Friends Not Forgotten so interesting. Ahsoka says that they need to take the opportunity to get Mandalore back from Maul, that they need to stop playing politics and insisting that the only thing that matters is the old and the familiar, Coruscant and the Chancellor. Obi-Wan and Anakin can’t go to Mandalore, obviously, because we’re in full clock-ticking Time mode and the train is about to go straight off the rails like in that Soul Asylum song. Ahsoka says that people are losing faith in the Jedi, in tradition, because it abandoned them when they needed the Order most. Obi-Wan is a hypocrite and full of hubris, and tells her she’s not being fair for prioritizing a non-Republic planet over One Dude Who Is Actually Very Evil. To be fair, he doesn’t know that Palpatine is evil, but right now putting the lives of the rich and powerful few over the lives of the general many is hitting close to home.)

\---

Rex: The Clone Wars’ other Main Character That Is A TCW Original. Like Ahsoka, Rex’s story is about Meaning. But instead of going the route that Ahsoka does, leaving behind everything she knows to find something new, Rex finds purpose in what he already has. The “make a balanced session” aspect of my Classpecting brain is yelling at me right now and trying to find any other Aspect for him, but really, he’s a Blood player and I cannot get around that. he’s the guy that says shit like “in my book, experience outranks everything” and “I also have another duty--to protect those men.” His story is about loyalty and deciding where that ultimately lies. Dear lord.

Rex has Three Big Character Moments: the episode in season two with the poorly-designed human-twi’lek children, the Umbara arc, and, of course, the Siege of Mandalore. these aren’t the end-all-be-all of his character arc, but they’re the most defining moments of Who Rex Is. 

First: The Deserter. This episode is the first time Rex (or any clone, for that matter) is asked to acknowledge the fact that they’re Soldiers In A War, and that even though they were created for war, there’s a life outside of that. At this point, Rex hasn’t had his faith in his purpose challenged much. Cut flat-out asks him why he’s still in the GAR when he could just desert and live the life he wants, the kind of life that would be meaningful to him. Rex responds that his role in the army is meaningful--he frames it this way: “what if it’s meaningful to me?” (I’ll talk more about this specific quote and what it says in regards to his Class later.)

Next: Umbara. This arc’s a rough one for a lot of reasons. This is where Rex does have his sense of Meaning challenged--Krell is very clear that he doesn’t care about the clones and doesn’t see them as people deserving of respect, just as a means to an end. Rex is asked to place his loyalty to authority, and thus Krell, over his loyalty to his men. The narrative makes him choose between Blood-as-tradition and Blood-as-family, and in this arc, he chooses tradition. He has a responsibility to not rock the boat, to not do the whole subordination thing like Fives and Jesse, to not subvert authority. He does get to tell Krell that while he has a duty (a word that came up a lot with Obi-Wan, see, I can do character analysis) to his commanding officer, whoever that may be, he also has a duty to the other clones. Ultimately, though, this is an arc that forces Rex to take stock of what really does matter to him, not just what should. The narrative asks him if finding Meaning in the GAR is worth it, and somehow, he still answers yes. Blood-bound stubbornness, I swear.

Finally: the Siege of Mandalore. You know, The Clone Wars is about Rex and Ahsoka, the characters at opposite ends of the narrative’s Meaning axis. They’re very much thematic foils, and this arc lets them have the back-and-forth to prove it. This arc brings back the tradition-vs-family conflict that Rex faced in the Umbara arc, but it adds Ahsoka into the equation. Shattered doesn’t let Rex choose, though--it makes the choice for him quite forcibly, and chooses tradition, authority, the Emperor. He does resist, to his credit, falling back onto what we all remember happening to Fives--family--for long enough to get Ahsoka rolling on Fixing Things. But when the chip’s taken out, though, he doesn’t choose the other clones, either. He knows that they aren’t the men he knew, and knows that to them, he and Ahsoka are Public Enemies Nos. 1 & 2 right now. No, he chooses the Breath player, even lets the Breath player latch onto Blood-as-family for him a bit. Fantastic symbolism, really. Victory and Death does a little switch on us, and you’d almost think their Aspects were swapped--Ahsoka says that she won’t kill the men, the representation of Blood, while Rex leans into Breath’s “let the past die, kill it if you have to” deal. (This is not a commentary on Kyle’s Aspect, though I do want to do an analysis of the sequels. Now, that’s how you make a Hope-led narrative.)

Interesting to note here: the two canon Blood players we get are Karkat and Kankri, both mutants. Karkat is put at a significant disadvantage in Alternian society because of the situation he was born into. One could argue a sort of opposite-sides-of-the-same-coin deal with Rex, what with him being one of millions of identical clones created to be, to put it bluntly, a slave army. They’re both oppressed by the metrics of their fictional worlds.

Have I proven that point? Either way: Class time.

“What if it’s meaningful to me?” Great quote. It also places Rex pretty solidly as an Alterant of his Aspect, like Padmé. 0pacifica describes the difference between Students and Alterants as this: imagine a horse. When Students steal a horse, it changes them from a non-horse-owner to a horse-owner. When Alterants steal a horse, it changes the horse from someone else’s horse to their horse. Replace horses with their Aspect, and boom, you’ve got it. Cut tries to define Meaning for Rex, but he quickly turns it around and says that Meaning is how he defines it, how he personally interacts with it.

The thing is, he doesn’t have an overly positive relationship with Blood, and the narrative doesn’t sideline him like it does the Commensalists. Hate to say it, but this guy’s a Witch of Blood. While Rex gets to have a general narrative, he doesn’t get what he wants. The narrative does, of course, but Rex? Rex watches Fives die, watches Echo presumably die and then leave the 501st once he comes back, loses Hardcase, has to deal with Kix mysteriously disappearing, and, to top it all off, has to literally bury Jesse and most of the others. The only people who he doesn’t have to deal with dying are Anakin and Ahsoka. Real fun times. I’m not gonna compare his suffering with Obi-Wan’s, because that’s mean and unfair and also not conducive to making people like me, but Star Wars really does love to beat up its Blood players.

Witches change their Aspect to further the narrative, but at their own expense. The narrative makes Rex reevaluate what Blood means to him again and again, even beyond the examples I've already gone through. And he chooses the option that hurts him and the people he cares about most, because either choice is going to compromise some Aspect of his beliefs. That’s why he says what he does to Cut: while the narrative is refusing to let him satisfy all of his Blood-bound duties, he has to believe that there’s something worth fighting for. That there’s some reason, some justification for what he goes through. 

But there isn’t any, beyond some old dude steepling his hands in his office and playing everyone for suckers. Palpatine created the clone army for a purpose, and Rex runs up against that again and again. It isn’t a duty he wants, even one he’s really aware of, but he’s bound by it. He has to create Meaning outside of that, has to beat himself bloody (ha, ha, get it--[sound of gunshots]) against the narrative to get any semblance of closure. Obi-Wan doesn’t have that level of necessary even-if-it-kills-me obligation to his Aspect, which is the real divide between him as a Commensalist Class and Rex as a Parasitic Class. Obi-Wan could, theoretically, walk away from his role, his duty, at any time.

Rex can't. He was created for a purpose, and he can’t wriggle out of it. While he’s desperately trying to change Blood in the narrative to be what he needs, pushing the proverbial rock up the hill, the narrative shoves him back down to where he started. Not once in The Clone Wars is he allowed to choose the other clones over authority, Palpatine, the Grand Master Plan, whatever you want to call it. At the end of the day it’s just the narrative. Rex can’t change Blood to what he needs it to be to succeed within the requirements of the story. He can’t choose the men over Krell, can’t choose Fives over the Guard and the Kaminoans, can’t choose Jesse and the rest over Order 66. As with the other Parasitic Classes, the narrative teaches him that, if you’ll pardon the Star Trek quote, resistance is futile.

\---

I’m not done with The Clone Wars yet, but I have one character from the prequels themselves that I’ve waited to discuss: Qui-Gon.

This guy is driven by his convictions--what he thinks is right, regardless of what other people think. He goes up against the Council, insisting that Anakin is the Chosen One and that the Force wills his training as a Jedi. The Council, particularly Mace, is like, “uh, dude, you just found this kid on a planet you crash-landed on, and also he’s terrified of everything.” Qui-Gon may or may not know this on an objective level, but his insistent idealism and belief that he is Right All The Time outweigh any common sense he may have. Qui-Gon is a Hope player.

The prequels are not an overly Hope-y narrative, given the general gloom and doom going on. However, what the narrative needs to kickstart the story is someone who believes in something, namely the concept of a Chosen One, too much, even to the point of their own destruction. Qui-Gon believes that he is where he is for a reason. Qui-Gon believes that Anakin is the Chosen One, and he has the extensive knowledge of prophecy to back it up. Qui-Gon believes that Anakin needs to be trained as a Jedi.

You could make a case for Heart-bound Qui-Gon, but it’s important to remember that as much as he may frame himself as the protagonist, his story is ultimately not about him. His life is centered around the idea of the Chosen One. Qui-Gon has devoted years of his life to studying prophecies and genuinely believes that they’ll come true. The narrative puts him in a position where his level of belief and conviction gets both what it wants and what he wants. 

Qui-Gon believes in the will of the Force (i.e. the narrative), and the Force wills him to find Anakin. At the end of the day, Qui-Gon wants what the narrative wants--they have the same goals. The narrative needs Anakin to be found and trained as a Jedi. The narrative needs someone to recognize that Anakin’s the Chosen One, the de facto protagonist. The one difference between what Qui-Gon wants and what the narrative wants is that the narrative needs Anakin to be trained by Obi-Wan. But he takes that in stride, too. Will of the Force.

Qui-Gon and the narrative have a relationship that is primarily mutually beneficial. The narrative lets him get what he wants, and it encourages him to take Hope and make it his. He’s the one insisting that Anakin is the Chosen One and that the Force is directly playing a role in his life. He’s taking the hope of the prophecies and turning it into the specific brand of Hope he thinks is necessary for what he wants to happen to, well, happen. He’s a solid Rogue.

Qui-Gon’s Hope doesn’t change him--he changes the Hope around him, the Hope of other people and the Hope of the prophecies, into something practical, like “finding the Chosen One via crash-landing on an outer-rim desert planet and convincing the council that it’s worth training and investing in him.” He says, “well, you all accept this aspect of Hope as something with worth, so I’m going to use that as leverage to get you to see Hope the way I do.” Qui-Gon is determined to get what he/the Force/the narrative wants. 

But Qui-Gon, the Rogue of Hope, still dies.

At the hands of our one and only Rage player, Maul.

\---

Maul is a wonderful character in terms of narrative analysis. We were all sure he was dead, but via TCW’s Breath-y meaning-expanding nature, he returns to the story. Maul desperately wants to be a main character--he wants the story to center him and how insanely angry he is and his quest to kill the guy who cut him in half like he’s Inigo Montoya and his legs are Inigo’s dead father and the six-fingered man is a space-British dandy with a laser sword. But he doesn’t even show up until season four! And even then, nobody listens to his monologues about how much he hates Obi-Wan and wants to make him suffer. Nobody really listens to him at all, actually.

Maul is the Cassandra. During the siege of Mandalore, he says in very obvious terms what’s been happening and what is happening right now and what will happen. And yet no one listens to him until it’s too late. Maul says things like “justice is a construct of the current power base.” He knows that everything is going to go very wrong, very quickly, and he’s decided to do what he’s always done--carve out a space in the galaxy and in the narrative for himself. Maul thrives off of chaos and disorder. 

Rage players are “bringers of confusion and doubt, and they can be frustratingly difficult to convince otherwise when they have attached themselves to an idea.” They can be dangerous and volatile. at their best they point out the things in the world that Are Not Working and know how to cut them out to make everything better. But if Hope is unchecked growth, then Rage is unchecked destruction. Maul goes on rampages--he has suffered, and he wants the person who made him suffer the most to suffer too, so he just. Destroys everything in his path. 

Oriyala has [an amazing meta](http://communistkenobi.tumblr.com/post/628627112521302016/maul-not-just-any-old-evil-guy) re: Maul as less of a character and more of “a symbolic representation of conflict and chaos.” Maul changes the status quo of the narrative--he doesn’t show up too often, but every time he does, it’s a Whole Ordeal For Everyone Involved, especially Obi-Wan. He is not technically necessary to the story (Star-Wars-As-A-Story functioned for thirteen years under the assumption that he was dead and gone), but he changes it irreversibly. He's a better example of a Rage player than Gamzee or Kurloz, I think, because he does what they do--sowing chaos--on a much larger level, and far more successfully. This guy tries to set up a criminal empire, stages an entire coup, and kills Satine. Gamzee and Kurloz do not have anything on him.

Maul is less of a Rage player than he is Rage incarnate, which actually makes it easy to narrow him down--on that alone, he’s an Heir, a Maid, or a Page. The narrative does not particularly like Maul or prioritize what he wants--he forces the proverbial cameras to turn and focus on him by making the biggest scene he can. Ultimately, though Maul causes scene after scene, he never really gets What He Wants. He doesn’t keep Mandalore, he doesn’t get Ahsoka and/or Ezra to be his apprentice, he doesn’t make Obi-Wan suffer enough. Maul is successful as a Rage player, but not in the ways that he really wants to be. The narrative almost turns his failure into a joke by the time Rebels rolls around and he finally kicks the bucket. Maul is a Page.

Maul is nothing but what his Aspect needs or wants him to be--he has two lines in The Phantom Menace, and they’re both about getting revenge, sowing chaos. In The Clone Wars, nobody can get him to shut up, but he’s talking because he loves the sound of his own voice he wants to plant seeds of doubt in their mind and/or straight-up hit them where they hurt the most. Rage players are scary, and a Page, someone who is only what their Aspect writes on them, as it were, is even scarier.

Pages don’t benefit from their narrative, and they don’t benefit others. Maul is kicked to the curb repeatedly--when we first find him in TCW, he’s living in a dump, half-crazed and half-dead. The narrative has it in for him, because Maul needs to go through that sort of meaningless suffering in order to accomplish what the narrative wants from him. Maul has a job to do, and he is dead-set on doing it, at the expense of himself. Maul shows that there is nothing good or noble about suffering for suffering’s sake. He is wildly successful at his job as a Rage player, but he dies alone and forgotten, left in a desert. He does what he needs to do, and when the narrative has no more use for him, it lets him go.

As Maul himself puts it: “I played my part. And do you know what happened to me? I was cast aside. I was forgotten.”

\---

I can do this. I can write about Palpatine without wanting to fling my Chromebook into a wall. God, you guys, I hate him. So much.

Palpatine is pulling all of the strings throughout the prequels and The Clone Wars. This guy is the man behind the curtain who repeatedly insists that we pay no attention to him. However, he is horribly self-centered. I mean, this guy says “I am the Senate” and means it. If his entry on Wookieepedia is to be believed, he created the Empire to protect and preserve himself. His entire shtick is doing some ult-Dirk narrative-controlling my-way-or-the-highway shit to get what he wants to happen to, well, happen. He wants to be in control, and he’ll do anything to be there. 

Heart players are known for being self-centered--it’s one of the most tell-tale characteristics they have. They’re focused on their own ego, placing the Meaning of the narrative on themselves. They firmly believe that the only things that matter are 1) themselves and 2) what they personally ascribe Meaning to. They choose what matters, and put themselves at the center of that choice. The Epilogues illustrate this pretty well: ult-Dirk is in nearly-complete control of the Meat narrative, and in the timeline where he isn’t allowed that level of control, he offs himself as soon as possible. It's extreme, but it’s Heart. 

Back in the day, a key element of Heart player metas talked about splinters. The Extended Zodiac Aspect description talks about how “they are excellent at putting on and taking off masks as the situation calls for them.” Palpatine checks both of these boxes. I mean, he comes back from the dead in The Rise of Skywalker as a clone of himself, and in Legends and Disney-canon he’s really into making clones of himself to keep himself in control of whatever’s going on. And he fools everyone into thinking that he’s just a nice old man who happened to stumble into a position of power rather than, i don’t know, a Sith Lord orchestrating the fall of the Republic.

Palpatine is the one pulling every single one of the strings, playing the entire Republic and confederacy for suckers. This guy is manipulative and he will get what he wants. He understands himself and his own ego/character so well that he knows exactly how to push other people’s buttons like they’re vending machines and he’s a teenage boy who wants his bag of Spicy Hot Cheetos. He’s convinced that he’s the one writing this story, and to an extent, he’s correct. 

He exploits other people’s egos, their desires and their weaknesses, to get what he wants. He does things thinking about what those decisions will bring about ten or twenty years down the line. He's building his own narrative, and everything will go exactly how he wants it to, sooner or later. (Case in point: he tries to get Anakin to kill Obi-Wan in the Deception arc. Anakin fails because he finds out that "Rako Hardeen" actually is Obi-Wan larping as a bounty hunter. Fast-forward twenty years, and bam, Darth Vader slices Obi-Wan clean in two. Talk about a long game.) 

Oddly enough, the narrative and Palpatine want the same things, and Palpatine is benefitted through the story of the prequels. (Less so the originals and the sequels, but that’s a topic for other metas that will ideally be coming somewhat soon.) The narrative needs Anakin to Fall, and Palpatine wants a strong and powerful apprentice. Bam, match made in heaven. 

You know, there isn’t really much out there about Lords and Muses besides what Calliope and Caliborn say. The implication is that both of them are about influencing other people through their Aspect, rather than directly using or changing it. If you drop a rock in a pond, you’re not directly changing the path of the water, but your actions lead to change anyways. It’s a bigger-picture role. As you’ve probably guessed at this point, I’ve hucked the ““Active/Passive”” dichotomy straight out the window, considering that neither of the cherubs are what I would call “reliable sources.” Honestly, I don’t think any of the canon SBURB players understand the full mechanics of the game--it’s like the idea of Can Fish See Water? The answer is that they can’t, by the way.

I digress. Anyways, Palpatine is probably a Lord. Like I said, he’s pulling all of the strings, in the same way that Caliborn orders his consorts around. All of the major villains, from Count Dooku to the Trade Federation, are doing his bidding, whether or not they realize it. He’s not on the same level of Character-In-The-Story as the other characters I’ve gone through, so it doesn’t make sense for him to have one of the Normal Player Classes. He isn’t really participating in the story directly, just sitting on the periphery and calling the shots. He gets people to do what he wants for him--he’s the Supreme Chancellor and a Sith Lord, so he sits in his office and occasionally makes a public appearance or sends a holo-call. Like any Heart player, he’s entirely invested in himself and what he thinks should happen, and as a Lord, he has the control and willpower to make his ideas reality.

\---

Well. That’s most of the Big Major Archetypal Characters. I have several more characters from the prequels and TCW that I want to pick apart, but that’s for a later date. I’m also planning on churning out similar story-character metas for the original and sequel trilogies, as well as Rebels when I finish it. I’m actually really excited about writing a sequel trilogy meta, despite how widely disliked it is.

Major thanks to [Esther 0pacifica](https://twitter.com/0pacifica?lang=en) and [Nick Oriyala](communistkenobi.tumblr.com), whose metas I referenced in varying degrees in an attempt to make sure that I wasn’t just pulling my views of characters and Classpects out of my ass. To be fair, most of this is probably bullshit anyways, but at least it’s bullshit that I enjoyed writing.

Drop a kudos or a comment or hit me up on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/transkenobis?lang=en) if you feel so inclined--I love talking about this stuff. 


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